Oxford City

Earlier this year a workshop was held in Oxford to look at the zone around the station known as Oxford Central West (read report). This area is crucial to the future of the city and is perhaps the most extraordinary underdeveloped area of any historic city in the UK. With plans for the redevelopment of…

Several key sites including the large area around Oxford Station and Oxpens; land on both sides of the railway; the area between Hythe Bridge Street and Park End Street, and the Osney Mead industrial estate are likely to be redeveloped over the next ten years. This offers a unique chance to create a new gateway…

Although Oxford Civic Society broadly welcomes the redevelopment of the Westgate shopping centre in the centre of Oxford the Society still has concerns about the shape and style of the development and its effect on the transport systems and traffic it will generate. The Society has therefore decided to ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to call in the outline planning application granted by Oxford City Council. The Society’s reasons are set out in the letter below. The principal reasons are the scale of the development, traffic issues and the need for re-assurance of objectivity in a situation where the City is a significant freeholder in the site.

CPRE is absolutely right to demand that public consultation on ‘Options’ for Northern Gateway should be put on hold until evidence of its traffic impact is available (Nightmare Vision March 6). This subject was ducked when the proposal was debated at the examination into the City Council’s Core Strategy in 2010 and the Inspector reported that it remained the outstanding issue to be resolved before the development could go ahead.

In our comments of October 24th 2013 we supported the principle of the Westgate redevelopment as a component of the regeneration of the West End Area of Oxford. We also made clear our concerns about the proposed redevelopment. Following a review of the revised application we are disappointed to see that our concerns have not been addressed.

(draft) Comments on Outline Planning Application 13/02557/OUT

Oxford Civic Society’s comments on the outline planning application for the redevelopment of the Westgate Centre (design issues).

Development design proposals

We have serious concerns that the design proposals continue to be inward-looking, with limited active frontages to the external elevations of large parts of Blocks B1, B2 and B3. We consider that this raises the risk of the Westgate centre being perceived as an island within the city, rather than as an integral and fully-connected element of the urban design. Coupled with the ‘traffic barrier’ effects of the large number of buses in Castle Street, and especially in Thames Street and Speedwell Street, the considerable lengths of inactive frontages will contribute to the severance of the adjacent areas of the city centre.